Saint Paul, Saint Phillip and Saint James Major

Saint Phillip and Saint James:

Edmé-Unité Jacquot-Préaux (1795 - 1849), Paris, until 1849;

His sale, Hôtel des ventes mobilières Rue des Jeuneurs, Bonnefons de Lavialle, Paris, 9-11 January 1850, lot 237;

René Soret, Paris, until 1863;

His sale, Hôtel Drouot, M^es Delbergue-Cormont, Paris, 4-9 May 1863, lot 146;

Private collection, France;

Sale, Hôtel Drouot, M^es Couturier et Nicolay, Paris, 9 December 1992, lot 59;

Private collection, Paris, until 2023.

Saint Paul:

Private collection, Portugal, until 2018.

This rare set of three plaques of the apostles Saint John the Evangelist, Saint Phillip and Saint James Major is among the earliest dated works by one of the greatest and most productive enamellers of sixteenth-century Limoges, Pierre Reymond. They retain their refined gilding and display several of the virtuoso enamelling and design techniques Reymond employed throughout his career, including his daring work with light and shade using few colours and white enamel applied in varying thicknesses. With their subtle colour palette, the present enamels connect the colourful works Reymond produced in the late 1530s, such as his Bon Berger and Bon Pastor series, with the grisaille tableware he is most famous for today. The three plaques, which have been recently reunited after having spent at least 175 years apart, were once part of a series of twelve apostles which adorned an elaborate piece of church decoration, which may well have been one of Reymond’s first major commissions. Only one other plaque from these series, Saint Bartholomew, seems to be known.¹ An example of how such plaques were mounted is recorded in a drawing of an altar in the now-lost church of Santa Maria della Celestia in Venice, which had an antependium adorned with many enamels of saints and sybils, and included a set of ten apostles which was made around 1540 by Pierre Reymond’s rival Leonard Limousin and recently appeared on the art market.²

A rarely discussed trait of Reymond’s work is the secular reliefs he embeds in the architecture of his columns, thrones, and tombs. Here they are visible at the base of the columns. These little follies mimic the Roman reliefs that Reymond and his Renaissance contemporaries imagined as integral parts of biblical towns such as Bethlehem. In Reymond’s case they tend to depict one or two daringly posed or battling nudes schematised through a seemingly effortless play of light and dark. Among the enamels signed by Reymond that incorporate such reliefs are the Bad pastor in a private collection illustrated by Blanc and three enamels with scenes from the Life of Christ in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.³ Reymond emulated figures from Marcantonio Raimondi’s print The Martyrdom of Saint Lawrence after Baccio Bandinelli from circa 1520 for the compositions of Saint Paul and Saint Phillip and an engraving of Saint James Major from a series of Christ and the apostles by Raimondi after Raphael.⁴ That these prints had some currency in Limoges is confirmed by a now lost enamel signed by the obscure Limoges enameller Etienne Mersier, which, according to an illustration in Jacob, has a nearly identical figure of Saint Paul concealing his sword under his cloak with his left hand.⁵ A more dramatically draped Saint Paul placed very similarly standing between two columns can be found on an enamel monogrammed by Couly Nouailher which is dated to circa 1540 in the British Museum.6 Both of these enamels are also inscribed SANCTE PAULE in gilt letters.

¹ Formerly in the collection of Frédéric Spitzer. His sale, Chevallier & Mannheim, Paris, 17 April - 16 June 1893, lot 464.

² Christie’s London, Masterpieces from a Rothschild collection, 4 July 2019, lot 5 (GBP 323.250); Mariacher, op. cit.

³ Blanc, op. cit., p. 76, fig. 2; Caroselli, op. cit., nos. 5-8.

⁴ E.g. Metropolitan Museum of Art inv. no. 17.3.3496 and Museum of Fine Arts Budapest inv. no. 5562

⁵ Jacob, op. cit., fig. 236.

⁶ inv. no. 1854, 1206.2

RELATED LITERATURE

P. L. Jacob, Les arts au Moyen Age et à l’époque de la Renaissance, Paris, 1871;

G. Mariacher, 'Di uno smalto limosino al museo Correr e di un disperso paliotto veneziano', Bolletino dei Musei Civici Veneziani, no. 4, 1958, pp.22-27;

S. Caroselli, The painted enamels of Limoges, cat. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, 1993;

J. Toussaint, Émaux de Limoges XIIe-XIXe siècles, exh. cat. Musée des arts anciens du namurois, Namur, 1996, p.102, no.65;

M. Blanc, Émaux peints de Limoges. XVe – XVIIIe siècles. La collection de Musée des arts décoratifs, cat. Musée des arts décoratifs, Paris, 2011.